Abstract

We describe a course in musical acoustics that required undergraduate students to design and build unique musical instruments, compose music for ensembles of them, and then perform the compositions in a public concert. Unlike most courses in musical acoustics which require the students to build home-made instruments as a final project, the construction of the instrument and composing original music were the primary goals of the course. The instruments were required to be artistic, visually interesting and play a pitch collection from the Western scale. We will describe the challenges and successes, show examples of the instruments, and review the lessons learned.